Joel Varty
Series: Building This Site

Sample Content Creation for Testing

Workcodingai

The agent created sample content so we can test everything. Some things worked, some didn't - that's the reality of working with APIs and content management systems.

nd it be in e of # Sample Content Creation for Testing

Date: January 6, 2026
Phase: Phase 7 - Content & CMS Integration
Status: Partially Complete

Note: This post is written from Joel's perspective (first person "I" = Joel). Technical details sections are clearly marked as written by the AI agent (Cursor - Claude Code).

The agent created sample content so we can test everything. Some things worked, some didn't - that's the reality of working with APIs and content management systems.

What Got Created

Blog Posts ✅

Five sample blog posts were created successfully:

  1. "The Importance of Third Spaces in Modern Life" (3rd spaces category, sports/theatre tags)
  2. "Why I Love Football: More Than Just a Game" (football category, sports tag)
  3. "Building Effective Teams: Lessons from Theatre and Tech" (work category, theatre/coding/leadership tags)
  4. "Remote Work and the Future of Third Spaces" (3rd spaces category, leadership tag)
  5. "Coding as Performance: What Developers Can Learn from Actors" (work category, theatre/coding tags)

These cover all three categories and use various tag combinations, which is perfect for testing filtering and display.

Career Entries ✅

Successfully created via MCP after fixing container reference name:

  • Agility CMS - CTO (2021-02-01 - present)
  • Agility CMS - President (2019-05-01 to 2021-01-31)
  • Agility CMS - VP of Innovation & Development (2005-02-01 to 2021-01-31)
  • Point Alliance Inc. - Solution Architect (2003-02-01 to 2005-01-31)

What Didn't Work

UsesItem Model: The UsesItem content model doesn't exist yet and needs to be created manually. The agent tried to create it via MCP but ran into schema validation issues with the LinkedContentDropdown field configuration.

Next Steps

  1. Create UsesItem Model and Items manually
  2. Test Everything:
    • Visit all pages
    • Test blog listing and detail pages
    • Test category and tag filtering
    • Test RSS feed
    • Run E2E tests
    • Run Lighthouse audit

Joel's Thoughts / Reflections

This just makes the whole website creation experience SO MUCH more seamless. When I'm in the codebase, I don't want to be context flipping back to the CMS to type a bunch of sample content in there.

I love just being able to prompt my agent to jam in some sample stuff that is reasonably similar in scope to what will be in used in production... and voila! I can keep going with creating code and testing things out.

That's the magic of AI Agents + MCP servers, and Agility's MCP server is legit awesome - especially when paired with Claude Code. The Claude engineers seem to have found the secret sauce for deciding when to use which MCP tool and it really just works nearly all of the time.